Surface Book Setup for Xamarin Developers

I recently aquired a brand new fancy Surface Book, fully speced out and ready to go for Xamarin development. Of course, my fear is always actually getting things setup for the very first time as it has been a few years since my last clean build. I figured I would take a few moments to document what I installed and setup to get everything running.

Turning on BitLocker

So this was for some reason difficult on my Surface Book as there were no TPM profiles installed. I wanted to ensure that I could setup BitLocker with a password I specified. So I had to:

Select Enable use of Bitlocker authentication requiring preboot keyboard input on slates (this will enable the tablet part of the book)

Enable it!<
*Then Select Require additional authentication at startup

Turn this on and set them all to Allow

Now you can enable BitLocker with a password :)

Visual Studio 2015

No reason really to install any older version on a clean machine. I headed over to visualstudio.com and downloaded the Enterprise Edition, however Pro or Community also work based on if you have MSDN or not.

Extensions

Immediatelly I installed:

Xamarin Test Recorder

SQLite for all the profiles

NuGet Date Fixer -> This fixes long build times when date times are weird

Xamarin

I actually ran into an issue when installing VS and it told me that for some reason part of the Android SDK did not install. This was the first time I have ever seen this, so I headed over to xamarin.com/download and downloaded the universal installer. This setup everything that may have been missing.

Misc Other Installs:

Workbooks & Inspector

This is an awesome feature of Xamarin to run your code live from a mark down file. Amazing! You can download the preview here.

Backblaze - Well worth the price each month to backup your entire machine

Visual Studio Code: Pretty good text editor

OneDrive: Used to be google drive, now I work at MS!

Configuring VS Android Emulator

I like to first install the 5" Marshmallow emulator that only takes 1 GB RAM (Moto G) and delete all other ones that are taking up room.

Fix Debug Issues

On some newer chipsets the VS Android Emulator can act pretty weird and you may not be able to debug apps. This is due to processor incompatibility. Do not fear! As there is 1 setting in Hyper-v to fix this under processors. Here is the guide from their FAQ.